1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image collation device, which is applied, for example, as a fingerprint collation device. The device of the present invention involves the operation that a plurality of linear images are selected, the selected linear image is scanned successively on another image to find the portion similar to the original image, and based on the relation of the coordinate value of the position of the detected portion, these detected coordinates are combined partially for collation of the image, and combinations which do not satisfy the relative positional relation corresponding to the linear images are excluded from the processing target which is to be subjected to subsequent processing, thereby the image collation device can obtain the collation result consistently within a short time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, in the conventional fingerprint collation device using an image collation device of this sort, featured points such as a branch, point, and cut (referred to as featured point hereinafter) are extracted from a fingerprint image obtained by means of an image pick-up device, and fingerprint collation is performed with reference to these featured points.
In other words, in the conventional fingerprint collation device, a fingerprint to be collated is previously converted to database with reference to, for example, featured points and coordinate values. A fingerprint image to be subjected to fingerprint collation is subjected to image processing in order to extract featured points. Then, a database has an access to the extracted featured points and the fingerprint is collated based on the existence of corresponding featured points.
The conventional fingerprint collation is disadvantageous in that fingerprint collation takes a long time. If fingerprint collation is carried out consistently within a short time, the fingerprint collation device provides improved convenience for use, and such improvement is desirable.